---The Tree---
Elvard was not a country. It was a legend with borders, a forest older than the word for forest, and at its heart the World Tree — a mountain that had decided, at the beginning of things, to be a tree.
They laid the body beneath its roots. Her father came down from the high seat in fury.
"He is the Underworld's seed," King Thalor said. "We do not plant what we cannot burn."
"You cannot plant a forest," Aelira answered, "and refuse the first seed."
"He spent everything he was on graves."
"Then someone," she said, "should spend something on him."
And she paid it herself. Time, which had ignored her for three hundred years, she handed back — her deathlessness, her centuries, all of it, poured into the roots like water. She would age now. She would grow old. She called it a fair trade, and her father, who had watched ten thousand years of dawn, turned his face away and wept, because he knew the arithmetic of love was older than elves.
They buried Shizui at the Tree's root — that is not what the elves called it, but it is what it was — and Aelira planted her seed upon his chest.
Far below the world, something on a bone throne stood up in alarm.
And sat back down. The Tree had decided.
In the dark beneath the roots, where all seeds answer one question before they wake, the Tree asked him what he intended to grow into. Kings had answered empires. Heroes had answered legends. Both answers had made the Tree sad for a very long time.
I don't know, said the seed that had been Shizui. I'd like to find out.
It was the first honest answer the Tree had heard in a thousand years.
He slept through three harvests. When he woke, white leaves were falling around him like slow snow, and a new sapling stood above his grave — pale-trunked, silver-barked, already taller than a man. The black marks had faded to thin ash-grey scars, like writing in an old book. His eyes were still red, but banked now. Quiet. For the first time in his life, the fire in his blood was not arguing with him.
It was not gone. It was simply finished.
He was mortal now, mostly. And he learned, later, what the dead had done without being asked: the freed souls of the Red Moon had marched home a second time — down, this time — and closed the Underworld's wound from the far side, each ghost a stone in the wall. The realm had shut its gates on them once.
In the end, they became the gate.